Increasingly, services and communication are achieved over the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW). Geographical location is becoming irrelevant with respect to network connectivity. Furthermore, the physical devices used by individuals to communicate and conduct business are increasingly becoming transparent through machine virtualization techniques and miniaturized.
As the industry uses more and more virtualization, there exists a problem on how the changes made by the end user are saved and restored. The end user may start out with a standard virtual machine (VM) image but as soon as a new program is added, some programs are run or files are saved, the image must be saved as an entirely new image or the changes will be lost if the user ends and restarts the user's VM. A user can map a personal disk to the running VM image and use it for all changes and installs, but this does not solve the problem. The reason for this is that when software is installed or runs it is common for the software to write to the root/boot drive. Writing to the root drive changes the base image, such that the base image must now be saved as a new image. This entire process can consume large amounts of storage/disk and add a required step to the end user. The described situation also adds new ways to lose data, time, and disk space.
As industries move to the cloud (a type of virtual environment), there exists a problem with how images are stored. Currently in a cloud or a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment, a user clones his/her desktop from a base template. This machine may only really be used from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. But, this machine cannot be deleted because it contains changes made by the end user.
Previous advancements made in the industry by Novell, Inc. of Waltham, Mass. solve this problem by writing all changes made by an end user to a separate disk. So, anytime a write is attempted to the image, the write operation is intercepted by a filter, and then the write operation actually occurs on a mapped drive. When the image or operating system (OS) of the image attempts to read from disk and if the filter detects that the file has been modified then the read operation actually occurs on the mapped drive. In this manner, all changes made to an image are stored elsewhere so one can delete the image and recreate it the next day. The filter on the new image reads and writes to the mapped drive assigned to the end user. With dynamic disk personalization one never stores a VM for anyone. There is a same base VM image for everyone with a disk attached containing all changes customized for each individual end user. The end user has no idea that the dynamic file relocation is happening or that he/she even has a personal disk.
However, there are some people that do a lot of work on different platforms (different OS environments, file systems, machine environments, etc.). An end user may run multiple different versions of WINDOWS® and/or LINUX®. If a particular end user has a WINDOWS® 7 and an OPENSUSE® 11.3 desktop in the cloud then there may need to be two different personal disks (one for WINDOWS® 7 and one for OPENSUSE®). So, if the end user has two separate personal disks then when he/she is using OPENSUSE®, he/she will not have access to files created when he/she was using WINDOWS® 7. The end user may elect to use some kind of file sharing software that stores the files on another server but this is more work for the end user and it will not be transparent or seamless to the end user.